Hope is not a strategy

“Hope is not a strategy.”

With that one line, former Home Affairs Secretary Mike Pezzullo cuts to the heart of Australia’s strategic complacency. In a wide-ranging interview for Powerlines, Pezzullo lays out a devastating account of how successive governments have failed to prepare the nation for a far more perilous world.

The warnings were there. In 2009, Pezzullo led the drafting of a Defence White Paper that recognised the accelerating militarisation of China — a build-up that “could only have one purpose... to give themselves the option to take on the Americans militarily.” That paper proposed a significant naval expansion, including a new class of 12 submarines.

“By 2030,” Pezzullo says, “we would have had a force getting close to 12.”

Instead, the plan was shelved after then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was toppled in 2010, and a decade of political churn followed.

The result? A nation without a functioning deterrent. When three Chinese warships recently sailed around Australia and conducted a live-fire drill in the Tasman Sea — the first shots fired by a non-ally in that region since the Japanese in the 1940s — Pezzullo says the most likely explanation is chilling:

“It probably was a rehearsal for a wartime combat operation.”

And Australia was unable to track them with its own navy because, he notes, “our two floating petrol stations are both broken at the moment.”

Worse, Pezzullo reveals that we now lack basic defensive capabilities.

“We have no mine countermeasures capability.”

If an adversary mined our ports, we’d have to “call someone... to clear out a channel into our harbour.” On missile defense, the story is just as bleak:

“We have no interceptors.”

Some weapons of war already lurk, invisibly, inside our borders.

“Pre-positioned malware... designed to be animated, to be activated so that you take down critical infrastructure. Water, power, energy, air traffic control.”

The next war, he warns, may start with a blackout.

“And then ships start exploding off one of our ports.”

Pezzullo does not believe war is imminent, but says it is prudent to plan for the “reasonable worst case scenario.” He calls for a complete reimagining of Australia’s strategic posture. We must be able to “hold out,” as Britain did in 1940 — with a population and a policy prepared to endure. We must be equipped to defend ourselves, on our own.

“We should not expect anyone else to shed their blood in our direct defence… if we're not prepared to shed our own blood.”

He urges investment in civil defense, energy resilience, cyber security, missile interception, and industrial self-reliance. Pointing to Sweden’s public campaign preparing citizens for conflict, he asks:

“Could you imagine the government here... launching a pamphlet on civil defense called ‘If War Were to Come’?”

It’s a warning from a man who’s spent a lifetime in the engine room of the state and who recognised threats before others did. Australia has been told. Whether it listens now is a test not just of government, but of national character.